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TechTarget News - Week of Apr 18, 2010

Storage tiering is a hot meme, and rightly so because it can lower costs and is an important way to use the speed of solid state disks to your advantage. But with three tiering choices in the market – hardware, storage software and document management software - all offering tiering features, how can users decide which tool is the best tiering option?

Storage tiering is a hot meme, and rightly so because it can lower costs and is an important way to use the speed of solid state disks to your advantage. But with three tiering choices in the market – hardware, storage software and document management software - all offering tiering features, how can users decide which tool is the best tiering option?

Dave Abraham, CEO of Signify, takes a look at the token versus tokenless 2FA question and concludes that both are needed With the growth in anywhere, anytime working, two-factor authentication (2FA) has, at long last, become the de facto standard for secure remote access to the corporate network.

Cisco senior vice president, Emerging Technologies Business Group, Martin de Beer, has claimed that two thirds of the multi-billion dollar installed collaboration market is held by vendors other than Cisco and Tandberg as the networking giant closed the acquisition of the Norwegian mid-market video

Sage has started the hunt for a CEO after long serving incumbent Paul Walker announced plans to quit the software company. Walker has been with Sage for 16 years as CEO and has informed the board that he intends to step down. According to reports which emerged yesterday in the Sunday Times the UK

Players in the nascent video channel expect to see major shifts in the market landscape in the coming months, following the announcement earlier that Cisco has completed the acquisition of Tandberg. Terry Dwyer, managing director at managed video-conferencing provider mvision, told MicroScope t

Expansive voice and data services provider Daisy Group has slashed costs of £17m out of the business over the last 15 months, according to a trading update released today. Following the reverse takeover of Daisy and managed web services provider Vialtus by Freedom4 last July, the acquisiti

Just weeks after Trustmarque cut support for volume resellers failing to add value it has moved to increase support for those dealers that are concentrating on services. Former Microwarehouse, Insight and Nimbus Technology Systems staffer Simon Rutt joins Trustmarque as director of marketing and pa

A small group of disgruntled investors have lodged lawsuits in the US against Bell Microproducts' board of directors for alleged breaches of shareholder duty by selling to Avnet too cheaply and in an unfair manner. According to support group Shareholders Foundation, which unites individual and

After years of blowing hot and cold over the future of its networking arm, HP ProCurve, Hewlett-Packard has now revealed that the ProCurve brand will disappear from the market and alongside 3Com, will become part of a new business unit called HP Networking.

Getting users to download fake security software in the hope that they have protected themselves remains one of the main routes for hackers hoping to get their hands on sensitive data. According to the latest security trends report from Symantec the volume of threats should prompt more coordinated

The United Nations has rejected a Russia-backed proposal for a treaty on cybercrime, despite widespread agreement that closer international co-operation is vital in a world more closely connected by global computer networks.

The most visited channel stories on MicroScope.co.uk from the last seven days: SCC wins Sprint ii government framework SCC beat off its rivals to renew a four-year pan-public sector framework agreement withBuying Solutions. Gateway signs first reseller contracts After a slow start

The services boon that IBM has clung to during the recession looked a little weatherworn in first quarter numbers rolled out last night, as unfavourable currency translations impacted revenue growth rates. Sales for the three months ended 31 March were up 5% to $22.9bn or flat when adjusting for fo

The imminent opening of US retail giant Best Buy's furst retail stores in the UK has sparked a reaction from Tesco. Although the most obvious competitors for Best Buy will be DSGi and the likes of Comet the importance of electrical sales has been indicated with the decision by Tesco to take on 1,00

Resellers reckon that SMBs expect to increase their technology spend during 2010 in an attempt to invest in tools that willdirectlybenefit their bottom line, according to research released by Microsoft. In its second annual SMB/Partner Insight report, Microsoft revealed that 63% of its Small Bus

The UK PC market returned to growth, according to first quarter preliminary results published by IDC today but the recovery continued to lag behind the continent. Around 3.2 million units were shipped in our sceptred isle during the period, up 11.5% on a year ago while sales in western Europe went

Yet again, Apple has powered to another record quarter for sales and profits, posting net profit of $3.07bn (£1.99bn) on sales of $13.49bn during the three months to 27 March. These figures represent year-on-year growth of 89.7% and 48.6% respectively. The vendor claims to have sold 2

Ericsson has picked up Nortel's 50% plus one share stake in its JV with Korean electronics giant LG for $242m (£156.8m) on a cash and debt free basis. Subject to regulatory approval, the profitable mobility and NGN venture will be renamed LG-Ericsson and will significantly expand Ericsson'

Virtualisation backup specialist Veeam is leaning on its distributors to add resellers with Microsoft knowledge to its roster. The need to get partners with Microsoft skills follows the compatibility of Veeam's nworks PRO pack for VMware which works with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Mana

Distributors will be hoping for a swift return to normality after airports re-opened late last night allowing stranded Brits to return to work and air freighted high ticket items to make it through from the Far East. During the past six days the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland

Cisco-challenger Juniper Networks has rounded off a productive first quarter, posting preliminary results that came in ahead of previously detailed expectations. Juniper made total sales of $912.6m (£593m), up 19% on the same period last year, while GAAP net income hit $161.3m or $0.30 pe

Symantec Hosted Services, formerly MessageLabs, has responded to reseller requests for simplification in its channel programmes and enhanced the deal registration rewards it gives partners. The hosted email specialist has been in consultations with resellers and has rejigged its global programmes a

In a further sign that economic conditions are improving Seagate has indicated that it expects demand to keep close to matching what it can supply throughout the rest of the year. The disk drive manufacturer revealed its forecasts of demand in its third quarter results which included higher profits

Social networking and cloud computing are leaving users exposed to cyber attacks as hackers start to exploit the latest ways of sharing data over the web. The preliminary findings of the 2010 Information Security Breaches Survey, which is launched next week at InfoSec, has been tracking the threat

VMware is not yet ready to call time on the recession despite posting double digit rises in profits and revenues for the first quarter. The virtualisation pioneer reported a 35% rise in sales to $634m and an 18% hike in profits to $102m for the period ended 31 March. The pick up in demand that VMw

Ian Curtis, head of UK and Ireland for interactive learning technology provider Promethean, looks at how resellers can ensure they are best placed to capitalise on demand for educational technology The UK is officially emerging from the recession, but commentators remain cautious about the pace o

Midwich has navigated the worst recession in the history of the IT industry to record top and bottom line growth. But the distributor has sounded a warning about the potential impact of pending public sector spending cuts on the channel this year and the need to pursue other growth sectors. Sales

Quarterly net profits at telepresence, video and voice vendor Polycom have slipped 38% year-on-year to $5m as the firm battled through the recession, but sales powered to a new record of $276m - up 23% on the same period last year - as businesses continued to jump at video solutions in a rush to sla

Sunbelt Software is aiming to exploit potential problems its rival McAfee might be having after it emerged that an anti-virus update the vendor sent out caused major headaches for XP users. McAfee released an update yesterday that had an impact on a quarantined Windows systems file and made life ex

The market for business intelligence has shown it can rise above cyclical patterns experienced by other parts of the software industry. A survey of the state of the BI market from Gartner indicated that although worldwide revenue did not increase at the same rate last year as it did in 2008 it rose

Ricoh has revised its financial forecast for its financial year upwards as a result of stronger than expected sales. The printer specialist has added 10m Yen onto its net sales forecast, a 0.5% increase, on the estimates it put out in January. It also revised pre-tax profit upwards by 57.1% to 55m

Dell has apologised for the lead time delays in certain consumer notebook shipments caused by the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland. The cloud of ash that cast a shadow across parts of Europe has now dissipated, allowing airports to re-open to work through the backlog of passengers and air freight

Enterprise IT budgets are expected to be flat in 2010 but CIOs should use those funds to adopt new technologies and solve daily operational irritants that detract from strategic, competitive projects. At least this was the advice Gartner dished out as it made public some details of this year's globa

Hewlett-Packard has confirmed it is investigating several resellers for grey marketing and will take a grim view of anyone found guilty. All vendors have the contractual right to strip an authorised reseller of its accreditation if it is found to have sourced kit from outside the European Economic

Comstor executive vice president Jon Pritchard has been made worldwide president of the distributor to reinforce its relationship with its key vendor, networking giant Cisco. He will take up the newly-created position effective immediately, and continues to report toWestcon president and CEO De

Cloud computing is set to change the rules in the software industry challenging existing suppliers and threatening the income of those resellers that are not offering users greater flexibility. The signs that things are already changing can be seen in the growth figures of cloud-based application s

EMC is planning on growing faster than the market this year by taking share from rivals and got off to a good start in a bullish first quarter. Sales were up 23% to $3.9bn - including a 22% climb in the Information Infrastructure division to $3.3bn and a 34% rise in VMware which contributed $632m t

Microsoft stepped closer to pre-recessionary profit levels and returned to revenue growth across nearly all divisions inits penultimate quarter of fiscal 2010. Amidst a bonanza of tech results this week, Redmond held its own by pushing up Q3 earnings 35% to $4bn but this was still short of the $4.3

Resellers are being handed the ability to check stock availability through their iPhones handing them the sort of flexibility that could prove to be vital when closing a deal. Stock sourcing specialist IT Dealer is launching an iPhone app that is a slimm ed-down version of its online subscription b

Microsoft has won its first big piracy battle in China against a Shanghai-based insurer. A Shanghai court found the Dazhong Insurance guilty of using illegal copies of Microsoft's software and ordered the insurer to pay $318,000 in damages.

Microsoft announced record revenue of $14.5bn for the quarter ending 21 March, a 6% increase from the same period the year before. The software firm reported operating income of $5.17bn and net income of $4.01bn, representing increases of 17% and 35% respectively compared with the same period the previous year.

There are a fair few anniversaries taking pleace this year in the storage world as vendors and technologies hit particular milestones. Among the list is the tenth birthday of Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks XP Disk Arrays and over the decade the vendor has not only improved its technology but seen the

Morse has confirmed it is locked in negotiations with a suitor understood to be 2e2 that could lead to an offer of 51 pence per share being tabled. Last night MicroScope called senior management at Morse and 2e2 to discuss continued talk in the industry that both firms have resurrected a deal, whic

The time it takes for IT companies to cough up and settle invoices continues to improve as firms start to get closer to paying on time. The recession saw the number of days beyond terms start to stretch over the horizon as companies struggled to get their hands of funds but the IT sector has been o

The great and the good in the security world meet in London next week at the InfoSec show, which runs for three days. As usual, there is plenty for resellers to see and hear at the show, but MicroScope has put together this preview to provide a starting guide to some of the stands to stop and see ov

SCH Group has returned to profitability, albeit marginal, but is not yet confident enough to call an end to the toughest recession in history amid concerns about expected cuts in UK public sector IT spending. The Birmingham-based hybrid player has released unaudited numbers for the year to 31 M

WAN optimisation specialist Riverbed has wrapped up its 24th consecutive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth after sales soared 27% to $112.4m during its first quarter, which closed at the end of March. GAAP net income rose a more modest 10% to $1.1m during the quarter. EMEA sales rose 2

The channel will become a slightly less colourful place after it emerged that former Repton managing director Greg Carlow is stepping back from day-to-day operations at Kelway, although he will continue to act as a consultant.

Raising the retirement age of high-tech hardware makes economical and environmental sense, writes Paul Timms, operations director at Maindec. With government drives for public sector efficiency and private sector organisations facing continued capital expenditure freezes, no organisation should be

How to make money in IT Managed Services A complimentary seminar from MicroScope, in association with Kaseya Following the huge success of MicroScope's recent event "How to succeed in IT Managed Services", which attracted over 160 delegates, Simon Quicke, Editor of MicroScope, is pleased